“Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“It is only through my daughter that I have come to realise that a life without femininity – devoid of mystery, emotion, gentleness and the unerring power of a woman’s love – is no life at all.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution

“Shamefully, human beings are the only mammals to separate mothers from their infants. Dr. John Krystal,
Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobiology at the Yale School
of Medicine, described the impact of maternal separation on
the infant as 'profound', citing the recent discovery that the
autonomic activity (heart rate and other involuntary nervous
system activity) of two-day-old sleeping babies is 176 per
cent higher during maternal separation.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution

“Delirious as it can be, sex is only one kind of intimacy, and yet has become the cultural catchment area for all kinds of needs because our understanding of intimacy is so poor. Brutal work schedules, related geographic isolation, and the concomitant fracturing of families has meant that there is little time for intimacy, and even less to teach the necessary skills. But intimacy, the axis of romance, is slow, based on the sharing of a life rather than show. In terms of intimacy, folding laundry together or sharing the feeding of a child can have more impact than the most extravagant bouquet.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“There is a world of difference between the experience
of 'care' – the wiping of a bottom, the bathing of a body: basic
biological obligations – and the intimacy that makes us want
to live.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution

“This human need for mysticism – surrender to an unknown truth, union – stands at the helm of all romantic feeling. It is, in essence, the same intimacy known in a mother’s arms; in those who are deprived of the experience, the need freezes and, distorted, it can rent a life. All addiction has as its foundation skewed yearning for the same transcendence. For me, the spell of the material was broken by my brother’s death; after his suicide, all I wanted was the renewal of my connection to the intangible.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“For years, I had used these fractured men to justify my cynicism and workaholism, and the grief, insomnia and casual anorexia were no longer of any interest to me.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“The bar is masculine, and women must adopt traditionally masculine characteristics – cultivated insensitivity, goal-orientated thinking, the prioritising of the material – to compete.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“On first hearing that little voice – as fine and friable, I felt, as cotton thread, the impact on my soul was that of the highest magnitude of earthquake, those that occur every hundred years, say, or every thousand. The old shell I called myself cracked and was swallowed by a sudden crevasse, and just as suddenly was lost in the commotion.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year’s Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“There were times when I would sob until I shook, until my eyelids were so swollen that it pained me to open them, and through hiccoughs, trembling, I would hiss, don’t touch me! as he moved to place a gentle hand on my shoulder. There were times when we seemed locked into our chairs, discrete, the static between us more eloquent than words. But there was never a moment when I doubted Peter’s ability to heal me.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“The very matrix of our ability to love and bond in later life, maternal sensitivity – or lack thereof – also determines cultural tenor.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution

“Marriage is never static. There are peaks and troughs, cycles. It is easy to forget that this shifting landscape is really only ever a reflection of the self. Our capacity for attachment determines the kind of mate we attract, and it is through this mate that we are forever transformed – marriage as alchemy, but also as a mirror.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“In our circle, stress was a valuable status marker: I stress, therefore I am.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“Maternal/child attachment is mostly eroded in increments. The separation begins in hospitals, where mothers are not only made to feel inferior to medical professionals in relation
to their infants, but regularly separated from their infants.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution

“Those who say marriage is no different to cohabitation are perhaps less sensitive to issues of continuity. Legally and socially, marriage provided us with an framework, struts: as a tradition, it predates history. And yet it is still trivialised as no more than “a piece of paper”, or by the perception of it as a kind of country club from which those demarcated as undesirable are excluded. But marriage is not about religion or gender; it is an admission of vulnerability, a commitment to the perpetual evaluation of priorities and a social stabiliser.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“My generation was, in effect, the product of a social experiment. If we did not understand marital intimacy, it was because we had not seen it modelled. We lurched from relationship to relationship, dazzled by the newness of meaninglessness, relentless in our search for something even the most perceptive of us could not identify.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“We watched each other evolve into parents, with all the fear, rage and confusion evolution can involve. Our eight-year-old is the incarnation of our union; we are forever fused by her blood. My old take on romance seemed vaguely ludicrous, as affected as a pair of spats. I no longer saw the point in 'getting back to normal', that pantomime of pretending nothing had changed; I wanted to evolve from sexual posturing into a deeper consciousness, that of love.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“Repudiating the vulnerability I felt had wrecked the lives of women around me, I modelled myself on my controlled father. I wanted his freedom and his focus. To him, a family was an aquarium: controlled, contained. To the women I knew, a family was everything.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“My handsome husband and I didn’t make love for almost six months. I was enraptured, lost to my old life, and, in this obsession, disregarded author Ayelet Waldman – who famously wrote of her 'smug well-being' and 'always vital, even torrid' sex life in the wake of childbirth: I ignored my husband as a man. Instead, I revelled in him as a different thing altogether, far more seductive and important, and infinitely more resonant. My husband was no longer just a man: he was the father of my child.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love